For sure growing your own tomatoes in the city does not end the dependency on the big supermarkets and does not stop the bizarre logistic practices by which the food that we eat gets to us. But in my opinion its a statement and a small step in the right direction. Space always is an issue, but I got lucky and moved into a house recently where we have a quite big common inner court. It was full of trash - old mattresses, broken furniture and dead christmas trees from two years ago.

I proposed my neighbors that I would bring the stuff to the junk yard and plant some tomatoes, beans and a few herbs instead. Surprisingly nobody objected :D

I used pallet collars that I saved from the trash at my workplace to build three raised planting beds. Initially I wanted to make a transparent roof for all the tomatoes (they don´t like rain) but ended up only covering one box.

The boxes were lined with some old plastic tarp to protect the wood and reduce evaporation. As an experiment I also isolated one box with some thin sheets of styrofoam. It seems that the tomatoes like that so far.

The tomatoes were grown from seeds from tomatoes that I bought on the farmers market about two months back. At first they were sitting on my window but soon hat to move out and into my pallet planting beds.

...and this is 16 days later: The tomatoes grow very fast, the beans on the right look happy as well. In the right box some carrot seeds were planted and in the left peppermint and some leek is growing.

The only expeses I had for this project was for the soil. 100 EUR. I didn´t expect that initially but I ended up using close to 700 liters of soil. Maybe I could have made the beds a bit more shallow.I´ll post an update in autumn and tell you how everything turned out.

edit: two weeks later: early August:

edit: and still a bit later: early September. All tomatoes are still green. More sun would be nice!